Most of the time pests and disease are just nature's way of telling the farmer he's doing something wrong.

There's a schizoid quality to our relationship with animals, in which sentiment and brutality exist side by side. Half the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this year, yet few of us pause to consider the miserable life of the pig - an animal easily as intelligent as a dog - that becomes the Christmas ham.

Imagine for a moment if we once again knew, strictly as a matter of course, these few unremarkable things: What it is we're eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what, in a true accounting, it really cost.

The corporatization of something as basic and intimate as eating is, for many of us today, a good place to draw the line.

The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.

Perhaps more than any other, the food industry is very sensitive to consumer demand.

Man is by definition the first and primary weed. Weeds are not the other. Weeds are us.